Category Archives: Conservatism

Rod Dreher: How to Primal Scream Your Way To The Pinnacle Of ‘Conservative’ Punditry

Conservatism, Critique, Ethics, Etiquette, Family, Juvenal Early's Archive, Morality, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Race, Racism

By Juvenal Early

The American Conservative: From Pitchfork Pat to The Crunchy Con Castrate

The Rob Stove article, recently posted here on BAB, reminded me that I hadn’t thought of Rod Dreher (Old Dreary) in many months.  I thought I’d check up on him. I know he’s living in Hungary now. He’s divorced, or about to be. Upon investigation, it turns out he’s on his own now, no longer under the auspices of The American Conservative (TAC), a lone blogger.  Perhaps Dreher’s February exit from TAC was hastened by a piece he wrote last December, after he’d recently discovered (courtesy of a lefty doxxer) that his father (deceased for several years now) had once been in the KKK.

The normal semi-public figure, on learning such a thing, might put out a short statement: “This was a shock to me. I certainly never knew of it. I’m not now, nor have I ever been a Klansman or a fellow traveler, etc.” Something like that.

My G-d, this creep posted a 9400 word screed, an anxiety attack directly from the heart to the blog. I scrolled through it, reading fair-sized chunks, more than enough to get the point.  The thing just went on and on, and often strayed from the (putative) central topic. All this hand-wringing self-pity. All Virtue signaling,  with the obligatory reminders about how wise the great Christian (he wasn’t) MLK was. How he, Dreary, had moved back to Louisiana to be with his family 12 years earlier to help them out and to be helped. But they were mean to him, they rejected him, and he went on at length about how their meanness eventually destroyed his marriage. Like he couldn’t screw it up on his own. Oh, the horror. An endless hissy fit, replete with spluttering lines like, “I thought he was a horrible reactionary whose judgment could not be trusted on anything.” You say that word “reactionary,” Mr Dreher, like it’s a bad thing.

I mean, you don’t say the things he said about his family and put it out there for public consumption. It should be a private matter. Share it with a confidant, if you must. Talk to the family directly—and privately. Don’t squeal on and on about how awful your family is and put it out there for the whole world to see.

Apparently, the family mostly hates him—down to the aunts and uncles and cousins. Even the dead don’t have much use for the guy (although Dreher makes use of them; posting a hazy image of his late father, as he lay dying). Gee, I wonder why.

After reading large portions of Dreher’s apologia, a line from an old war movie, “The Bridges of Toko-Ri,” came back to me, viz., “Where do we get such men?” Irony very much intended. What does it say about TAC, that they would publish such melodramatic tripe? They’ve come a long way from Pitchfork Pat to the Crunchy Con.  You’d think conservatism’s flagship publication might stand up for traditional values, e.g., honor, personal responsibility, family loyalty, toxic masculinity, etc. You’d at least think that the material they publish was—and it’s a low bar these days—conservative. But, then, TAC didn’t even stand up for their founder, Mr. Buchanan.

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“Juvenal Early” is a contributor to Barely A Blog and an all-round bon vivant for literature and high-culture. His 2020 piece, “The Dissident Right Has An Idiocracy Problem,” created quite the buzz.

*Articles About Rod Dreary on BAB

NEW COLUMN: Subpar Submersible: Woke Will Implode, On Land And Underwater

America, Conservatism, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Intelligence, Natural Law, Technology

Truth to tell, the Titan resembled nothing so much as a ‘Hold My Beer’ contraption, assembled with parts as good as you get from Home Depot

…a carbon fiber cylindrical hull, topped and tailed with Titanium hemispheres. Titanium glued to carbon fiber with an epoxy-type resin and fastened with bolts: Just image the iffy quality of joiners that meld dissimilar materials under the pressure of 376 atmospheres! ~ilana

NEW COLUMN is “Subpar Submersible: Woke Will Implode, On Land And Underwater.” It is a feature on WND.COM, The Unz Review and The New American

You can read it now on IlanaMercer.com.

Excerpt:

… In hiring, Mr. Rush clearly prized the cool quotient over cool-headed competency.

OceanGate—which “sounds like a scam waiting to happen,” quipped engineer podcaster “Two Bit da Vinci”—was an outfit out of Everett, Washington. It had been aggressively marketing the Titan as a vessel fit for deep-sea exploration. Yet, rather than use a metal that withstands compression; for the main composite of their subpar submersible, the anti-white ageist brainiacs of OceanGate chose carbon fiber.

Some reports contend that “NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama helped build the lost Titanic submersible.” Charitably put, it is unclear how involved NASA engineers and the Washington State academic dumbassery were with Titan’s cool kids. Disavowals from NASA, Boeing and the University of Washington notwithstanding; on this count, I intuitively believe Titan CEO Rush. Daily Mail alleges that Rush “had hired interns from Washington State University who … boast[ed that] … a PlayStation remote was used to run the Titan.”

Rush chose to use consumer electronics for a high-reliability application! In all likelihood, however, the Sony PlayStation controller would have been the more reliable node in the Titan’s intern-devised electrical network.

For it is quite clear that systemic, institutional rot now defines American institutions, commercial, civic and state. My 2011 book, Into The Cannibal’s Pot; Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa, warned, by way of an example, that ridding Eskom, a South African electricity public utility that once helped power the continent, of the best engineers—experienced white men—would plunge South Africa into darkness. So it has.

What is also clear is that the mission of the white-hating Deep-Sea techies of the Titan is shared by Deep Tech (aka Big Tech) in general: marginalize whites and the attendant issue of competency. …

… Contra Stockton Rush, when engineers in-the-know speak of the Titan; they speak of a lack of mechanical tests, an absence of a locator beacon; an indifference to the operational lifetime—namely cumulative, structural fatigue—of such an inherently rickety tube; all compounded by the submersible’s primary composite: carbon fiber. “Exotic in the world of materials,” carbon fiber is unsuited to the task of withstanding immense pressure.

… THE REST. READ  “Subpar Submersible: Woke Will Implode, On Land And Underwater” on WND.COM, The Unz Review and The New American.

NEW COLUMN: King Tuck, Like Trump, Is Transformational

Celebrity, Conservatism, Free Speech, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Politics, Populism, Republicans, The Establishment

King Tuck clearly carried the Fox News network and its nits ~ilana

NEW COLUMN is “King Tuck, Like Trump, Is Transformational.” It is up and ready to read on WND.COM, The New American and The Unz Review.

On the week-end, you’ll be able to read it on IlanaMercer.com.

Excerpt:

Whether full of spleen or in support of Tucker Carlson, the commentariat, as usual, was dead wrong about the effects of his firing on the Fox News network.

The disposable clowns at The Dispatch echoed the gleeful sentiment, coming from the left and the pseudo-right. Posted on Nick Catoggio’s crudely (and cruelly) titled “Boiling Frogs” blog was a number titled “Tuckered Out: Be careful what you wish for.”

Catoggio, formerly of Allahpundit, belched, May 9, that, “On the day Fox News parted ways with Tucker Carlson,” he “doubted …the network would suffer much, if at all, in the 8 p.m. hour. ‘For all the hype about Carlson’s ratings, the truth is that any dogmatic right-wing figure airing at 8 p.m. on Fox News will attract an enormous audience.’”

This reflexive, Freudian “Wish fulfillment”—“the satisfaction of a desire (for Tucker’s demise) through an involuntary thought process”—encapsulates the cowardly gloating Tucker received following his professional garroting by Fox News.

From her self- referential and reverential perch, Megyn Kelly insisted that, just as in her case, the perch (Fox News) would always outlive the anchor (Tucker Carlson). Well, of course. Ms. Kelly would say so. She has plenty cognitive dissonance to reconcile: She is not Tucker Carlson. No sooner had she fled Fox News for more progressive media climes than Tucker stepped into her stilettos—and nobody remembered Kelly.

Before she abandoned her “Kelly File” Fox News show, Ms. Kelly had firmly aligned with members of the Murdoch Media for a Marco Rubio victory. Side by side with lightweights like Dana Perinno, and other egos in the anchor’s chair, Ms. Kelly had made manifest, in February of 2016, that she was hoping someone like Rubio would slay The Donald dragon.

Kelly is a lot smarter than Kayleigh McEnany (whose hard-to-spell names one has always to cut-‘n-paste) and simpleton Lawrence Jones, both of whom have attempted to fill-in on Fox at 8 p.m. Neither, however, is in Tucker’s league. Kelly was also more politically independent than these two tools and others considered for the peerless Tucker’s slot.

Most all at Fox New are party operatives, certainly not one is as nimble intellectually, or has the elemental intellectual curiosity of a Tucker Carlson. …

…READ THE REST… “King Tuck, Like Trump, Is Transformational” is up and ready to read on WND.COM, The New American and The Unz Review

UPDATE II (4/15): The Beef Vs. Bugs Phony Dichotomy

Conservatism, Criminal Injustice, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, Gender, Israel, Justice, Literature, Logic, Reason

Animal husbandry—Intensive animal farming or industrial livestock production, in this case—is humanity’s Mark of Cain …~ilana

To be Right and reactionary (check) you don’t have to be gang-ho about and indifferent to the horrors of industrial livestock production ~ilana

The idea that humanity has only the bug vs. meat-guzzler eating options sets up a false dichotomy and gets a fail on logic and ethics ~ilana

On or around the time of this travesty—the evil, the indifference—of letting 18 thousand cows go up in flames—author Meir Shalev died, aged 74.

For the richness of his descriptions and the depth of the depictions and characters, down to his achingly exquisite unusual sensitivity and sensibility about animals—Shalev is up there with the greatest writers. (Nobel Prize winner Shai Agnon was a vegan.)

Nabokov of the Israelis? Maybe, but Shalev was unburdened by Nabokov’s prurient preoccupation with decadence, mired as he was in it.

Meir Shalev was a soulful innocent.

About the cow, Shalev said that she is the longest suffering, most abused of livestock—made to lactate unnaturally and painfully for a lifespan (which is why milk is puss-filled, by the way; to “regulated” levels, of course), her young removed, and then she, at life’s end, led to the slaughterhouse.

Shalev has described the cries of a heifer when her calf is removed. They go on for a very very long time.

Animal husbandry—Intensive animal farming or industrial livestock production, in this case—is humanity’s Mark of Cain …

*Screen pic image credit

*Shalev as screen pic

UPDATED: Animal Ethics @TuckerCarlson. NONE.

This update is from a January 18, 2023 tweet. It concerns the tenor on the Tucker Carlson Tonight show when it comes to animal ethics. Many of my readers have long-since abandoned the Republican line of rape-and-pillage-the-earth-it’s-yours. (That’s not in or from the Hebrew Testament!)

One person, whose comment I posted to Twitter and Gttr, appreciated my disgust with the flippancy on conservative shows as to animal ethics and husbandry. Other than dogs and cats, the traditional pets that comply with humanity’s slobbering needs—cons have no animal ethics bar utilitarianism: squeeze all you can from em to sate your ugly big gut.

On masking a cow:

Nobody on Tucker Carlson made an ethical argument against CRUELTY to one of the longest-suffering animals in the barnyard: the cow.

But great strides in thinking were made thanks to a cute, blond, fashionable farmer girl in serious war-paint (make-up).

AND, blond and cute is more important than ethics anytime.

Today, April 14, 2023, came a repeat performance, in the form of an idiotic segment on bug eating. Run for cover. They’ll force feed you bugs.

The Beef Vs. Bugs Phony Dichotomy

Every country in the West emulates America’s Fox News in producing their own standard issue Tomi Lahren quality thinker and lookers to compete for segments on Tucker. And so it is that the US, Fox News, creates a global marketplace for blond bimbos.

My mother, a Dutch citizen for over four decades, tells me that the Dutch, a serious and glum people, despise such Americanism. Among the Hard Right, the Dutch still carry the torch for that brilliant orator, Geert Wilders, who comes close to Assange in leading a life of martyrdom for truth.

For another, a good journalist would question the so-called veracity of the global plan to force-humanity to eat bugs en masse (don’t believe every conspiracy Tucker feeds ya). Bugs serve important ecological functions. Eat them all and you really won’t have food.

The creation of these false dichotomies and straw arguments when it comes to ethics in animal husbandry is loathsome—certainly irrational and illogical.

One can eat animals if one must and do so ethically. Of course, you cannot mass-produce animals ethically. But the idea that humanity has only the bug vs. meat-guzzler eating options sets up a false dichotomy and gets a fail on logic and ethics.

Moreover, the rah-rah of badmouthing of vegans is also worse than pathetic. Many young conservatives, or sensitive conservatives, are likely not on board. It’s of a piece with the phoniness of the old Republican, red-blooded girl and guy shtick. Not all vegans are activists with pink hair. Most are simply concerned with the ethics around eating animals.

In sum, to be Right and reactionary (check) you don’t have to be gang-ho about and indifferent to the horrors of industrial livestock production.